Moritz Neuhoff: Spectrum
Edward Cella Gallery proudly presents the newest paintings of German artist Moritz Neuhoff in his first exhibition in the United States entitled, Spectrum. Neuhoff celebrates the act of painting by creating boldly gestural canvases that confound with their subliminal effects, their unexpectedly flat, almost mechanical-like physical character, and shimmering iridescent light. Challenging our perception, the artist creates paintings of complex visual character that flow between focus and blurriness, movement and space, texture and immateriality, and ultimately foster an experience of astonishing visual transreality.
Fusing the artificial illumination and immateriality of pictorial representation found in today’s media rich environments, Neuhoff transfers the movement of his body onto the canvas with surging viscous linear marks that tangle and knot. Coursing with the vitality found in the unpredictable forces of life that surround us, the scale of these gestures confronts the viewer not unlike urban graffiti forcing one to engage with them. Considered in the context of Post Vandalism, Neuhoff remakes the influences of street art by destroying the physical nature of his dimensional brushwork and creates transcendent paintings that defeat the viewer’s visual analysis of their graphic depiction.
Neuhoff states, “As an artist I am continually questioning what form abstract painting can take today to maintain an even footing with our media environment and our media experiences. My paintings operate with the assurance that painting can simultaneously equate to what it can accomplish through the physical process of applying paint while at the same time radically undermining that process.”
Incorporating a proprietary set of additive and reductive painting processes in his Berlin studio, the material appearance of Neuhoff’s artwork suggest a physical, three-dimensional application of thick paint. Upon closer inspection, his surfaces dematerialize and disintegrate into a sandy ground that mimic unknown digital reproduction methods.
He states, “On the one hand the painted gesture in my paintings seems like a direct trace of my body and the brush I use. Observers of my work might seem able to discern the tools and materials I use, and it would appear that I am lifting the curtain on my process. But on the other hand, these gestural traces – the heavily contoured three-dimensional brushstrokes that are first apparent in my painting – can also seem virtual or disembodied, even machine-made, and refuse to reveal how they came into being. In this dialectic between actual physicality and virtual appearance, my paintings resort to the characteristic core factors of painting: light, color, space, movement and finally materiality itself.”
Adopting an array of different painting strategies found in the rich history of abstract painting, Neuhoff generates a distinctive body of work which speak to reflexive meta-painting with simultaneous authorship and physical presence, but also exposing itself as an illusion. For this reason, Neuhoff’s work was recently featured at the Museum of Non-Objective Art, Otterndorf, Germany (2019) in a solo exhibition entitled, Apparent Magnitude and accompanied by his first monograph. The German painter’s practice was also recently included in the benchmark, multi-venue exhibition, Now! Young Painting in Germany presented simultaneously by the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Museum Wiesbaden, the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz – Museum Gunzenhauser, and the later at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and investigated the state of the medium today among young painters without conceptual or ideological restrictions.
Presenting some of artist’s newest large and medium format paintings in his debut with the gallery, Moritz Neuhoff: Spectrum offers an initial encounter with this formative young artist in Los Angeles. The exhibition runs concurrently with Moritz Neuhoff: Tangled Relations presented by Hengesbach Gallery, Wuppertal, Germany which remains on view through November 4, 2022 and is complemented by an illustrated monograph, and his work is also included in a group exhibition curated by Stephen Burke at the Omni Gallery, London that runs October 20 through November 6, 2022.
The exhibition, Moritz Neuhoff: Spectrum is the second in a series of three solo exhibitions entitled Berliner Fokus. The series is a new element in the Edward Cella Gallery program and introduces notable emerging artists living and working in Berlin, Germany through a collaboration with the Los Angeles based artist residency project Himalaya Club. Intended as an annual series of exhibitions that will take place in the Fall, Berliner Fokus seeks to address over time the narratives that bind, differentiate, and distinguish the art communities of Los Angeles and Berlin; and build on the longer established cultural exchanges of these two sister cities.
Moritz Neuhoff: Spectrum
Edward Cella Gallery @ Himalaya Club
1109 N. La Brea Ave.
Inglewood, CA 90302
Open House Reception: Saturday, October 15, 2022 | Noon to 6 PM
Conversation with the Artist and Edward Cella | 3 PM
On View Daily: Sunday, October 16 through Saturday, October 22, 2022
11 am to 4 pm and by appointment through October 29
Street parking
